Questions

This is a question-driven exploration of future work on Drasil.

1. What artifacts occur in software projects?
   • it would be useful to know the relative frequency, as a very crude means of prioritization
2. What information is contained in those artifacts?
   • more precisely, how can the information be classified into different kinds?
3. How would one encode those different kinds information (so as to be re-usable)?
   • ex: math expressions, sentences, semi-structured sentences, semi-structured sets of these, 'theories', etc.
4. What is the provenance of that information?
   • provenance will reveal meta-artifacts that may not typically be in projects, but exist nonetheless
5. When taking all the information in a set of of artifacts as a coherent whole,
   • what is the joint information?
   • what is the unique information?
6. How does one transform encoded information into the form it appears in final artifacts?
   • i.e. this is a reverse operation to the encoding step(s) above
7. How to store a 'database' of such information so that it can be reused?
8. How does one specify a set of transformations that makes up a 'recipe' from information to artifacts?
9. How does one make that set of transformation modular?
10. Observation: a software system (like Drasil) is itself a software project - could Drasil be encoded in Drasil?
    • inspired by compilers, micro-passes is probably a good way to go

Stuff to add to above:

• new backends (Matlab, C, Rust, ...)
• testing as a cross-cutting approach
• version control
• workflow
• very different domains
• embedded computational knowledge
• best practices
• generalized definition of developer productivity